What We Still Need to Learn about AI in Marketing -- and Beyond

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. A growing number of companies are turning to artificial intelligence to solve some of their most vexing problems. The promise of AI is that it can go through vast amounts of data and help people make better decisions. And one area where companies often search for profitable use cases for the technology is in marketing. It's harder than it looks. Data scientists at one consumer goods company recently used AI to improve the accuracy of the sales forecasting system. While they did get the system working better overall, it actually got worse at forecasting high margin products. And so the new, improved system actually lost money. Today's guest says that many leaders lean too heavily on AI and marketing without first thinking through how to interact with it.